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PARTISAN REVIEW
direct response to the news of the failed hijacking and the deaths of
their comrades in the Mogadishu raid. Subsequent terrorist threats,
issued soon thereafter, in early November,
to
blow up Lufthansa planes,
were all couched in terms not of political struggle but of revenge: "For
each assassinated comrade, we shall blow up a Lufthansa plane in
flight." The suicides and these threats reflect the presence of a small
clique of movement adherents fanatically bound to one another, as
opposed to a small clique of committed revolutionaries whose objec–
tives are the shared desire to bring about a moment of future triumph
in history.
It
is as though the most important thing to the terrorists is
not their shared goal, but rather their bond, their relationship, their
membership in a group. Their acts are, in some measure, merely public
declarations of their membership and solidarity and not actions in
pursuit of a political goal.
In
contrast, imprisoned terrorists and
radicals of the past have contemplated escape and endured jail sen–
tences in order
to
further carryon a struggle, especially in the memory
of fallen comrades.
When one considers this deep interpersonal loyalty to the move–
ment, the internationalism, and the lack of a coherent political stance
together with the particular acts of ' terror committed by German
terrorists, a picture frighteningly reminiscent of early Nazi party
members emerges. The allegiance to movement over ideals, to the
glorification of personal sacrifice, the contempt of nationalism and the
aggressive urge for international success and domination were charac–
teristic of the Nazis. Even Nazi racial theorie's had no firm end point,
for beyond Jews there were Slavs and then others. The process of terror
and violence, rather than the achievement of a stable political order,
were, for the Nazis, ends in themselves. When one considers the victims
.of recent German terrorist acts in the context of terrorist international–
ism and movement loyalty (at the expense of self-interest or even
survival), even stronger parallels emerge. The choice of airplane
passengers as victims and future victims recapitulates the unpredict–
able and international nature of Nazi terror, its treatment of life as
superfluous, and its penchant for, by otherwise reasonable political
standards, "innocent" victims. The contemporary German terrorist, by
engaging in comparable terror with comparable group and political
characteristics, re-enacts a form of extreme alienation from German
society and democracy perhaps revealingly comparable to the behavior
of many earl y fascists and Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s.
If
terrorism, in general, has a rationale, one aspect is the dramati–
zation ofa cause to the world, as was the case with the quite odd
